Skip to main content
PC Gamer PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES
flag of UK
UK
flag of US
US
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of Australia
Australia
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
  • Games
  • Hardware
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Video
  • Forum
  • More
    • PC Gaming Show
    • Software
    • Movies & TV
    • Coupons
    • Magazine
    • Newsletter
    • Community guidelines
    • Affiliate links
    • Meet the team
    • About PC Gamer
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
Why subscribe?
  • Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag
  • Try a single issue or save on a subscription
  • Issues delivered straight to your door or device
From$32.49
Subscribe now
Popular
  • Essential Hardware
  • Battlefield 6
  • Helldivers 2
  • PC Gamer quizzes!
  • AI
Don't miss these
Grounded 2 tips: A character wearing a gas mask holding a club standing on a plastic fork overlooking Brookhollow Park.
Survival & Crafting 7 Grounded 2 tips to survive Brookhollow Park
Grounded 2 Networking PSA: A character holding a club standing at the base of the Network Centre on the statue, with a purple Stranger symbol on the wall behind them.
Survival & Crafting Don't repeat my mistakes in Grounded 2's Networking mission, or you'll face an arduous slog back to collect your lost loot
Rematch football game
Sports 7 Rematch tips to help you hone your football skills
Character glancing to the side
Horror Supermassive Games is adding a new tool to its next horror game Directive 8020 that'll give players a 'second chance' to save their favourite characters
Death Stranding 2 best upgrades - Sam
Action PSA: Grab the best upgrades from Death Stranding 2's first area before you leave
FBC Firebreak best kit - A player in the shower
FPS FBC: Firebreak review – Delightfully silly, but hindered by balancing issues and limited replay value
Hanna's face, half-lit by a sunset.
Adventure Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review—Beautiful Scandinavian stealth that's too strict for its own good
A cowboy robot carrying my dead body
FPS Mycopunk Review: Long live wacky co-op shooters
Battlefield 6 attachment recoil: A group of soldiers holding guns crouching behind a wall, as if waiting to move.
FPS The biggest thing that needs balancing in Battlefield 6 isn't the weapons—it's the attachments
The Alters screenshot showing a clone of Jan.
Adventure The Alters review: A masterclass in high tension gaming
Death Stranding 2
Action 11 little Death Stranding 2 improvements that made me say 'hell yeah'
Death Stranding 2 APAS - Sam
Action Death Stranding 2 is too damn easy
A soldier from Battlefield 6. He's got what appears to be a burn scar along his right side and is clenching his jaw while looking off screen. He seems to be under interrogation in a dark room
FPS Battlefield 6 producer insists the game's 'cool' and 'relatable' PMC villain and its quest to destroy the US has no deeper meaning: 'We needed two factions'
Battlefield 6
FPS After 4 hours with Battlefield 6, I think Battlefield is really back this time
Strategy It's time to sort your life out and marathon the finest WW2 real-time tactics games of the early '00s—and for a mere $10, too
  1. Games
  2. FPS
  3. Homefront: The Revolution

Six things I wish I knew before playing Homefront: The Revolution

Features
By Tyler Wilde published 17 May 2016

How to be a better resistance fighter.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Our review of Homefront: The Revolution is still a work in-progress, but while I finish the campaign and sort out my thoughts, I have a few tips for anyone jumping in now. Homefront isn’t an especially difficult game, but there are ways to make it a little more fun by skipping over its more sluggish moments with the tactics and upgrades it allows. Here are six things you may not realize right away, but that will help you along if you’re struggling with any early missions.

Page 1 of 7
Page 1 of 7
Just run

Just run

Red zones are off-limits to the public and heavily patrolled. Getting into an extended firefight with a squad of soldiers will just lead to disaster when an airship starts honking its fog horn and tanks roll in. So to get to objectives, you have a few options: drive a motorcycle as fast as you can, carefully sneak past each patrol, or just run.

I recommend the latter. The motorcycles are hard to control and likely to throw you off or get stuck in something. Carefully sneaking around is alright for a little while, but gets tedious when you realize how much of the red zones you have to traverse. Running is surprisingly effective. You’ll be spotted, probably multiple times, but if you just keep running you’ll probably get where you’re going mostly unharmed, with no one tailing you. To some degree, this is a flaw of Homefront, almost cheat-like and probably not the intended solution. But I’d rather be accomplishing missions than getting into long futile scraps on the way to each target.

Page 2 of 7
Page 2 of 7
 Get the stacked mag pouch

Get the stacked mag pouch

You can refill your ammo by visiting a store in one of your safehouses and then backing out (it’s slightly annoying that if it’s going to be so easy it isn’t just automatic), or by robbing corpses, and it’s fairly plentiful. Still, running out of ammo—especially for your often vital rocket launcher—in the middle of battle is a pain. It took me forever to finally buy the extra ammo packs available in the gear section of the store, but I should have made it an early priority. Definitely get it before worrying about RC car explosives—they just get stuck on rubble and are mostly useless.

Page 3 of 7
Page 3 of 7
 Skip an animation

Skip an animation

This might be patched out by the time you’re reading it, but currently there’s an annoying little issue when looting a corpse. Ammo and explosives are added to your inventory as you hold down the loot key, and there’s no animation. Let the looting progress bar fill up, though, and suddenly you jump into a disorienting hand grabbing motion before being allowed to stand up. If you stop pressing the key after the loot is collected but before the bar finishes, however, you can skip that animation all together and get back to cover. It’s a minor thing, but it does make a difference when you’re being shot at, so it’s worth getting used to ‘active looting.’  

Page 4 of 7
Page 4 of 7
Try another building

Try another building

Capturing safehouses is a big part of Homefront. They provide a new place to respawn, among other things, so it’s always a good idea to capture one near a difficult objective so you’re not running too far if you die. Most of the bases have some kind of simple entry puzzle, with blue paint splattered along the route. If you can’t figure out how to get into a building, or get up to the next floor, there’s a good chance you have to go to a building next to it. A lot these infiltrations require scurrying around exterior scaffolding and through windows.

You’ll sometimes have to shoot something—locks keeping a makeshift drawbridge upright, for instance—and it isn’t always obvious, so keep that in mind. And make sure you don’t leave home without some hack tools, or the ingredients to make them, because you’ll occasionally need them. Now if only the resistance would stop spray painting anti-occupier graffiti on their safehouses, they might not get raided so much. You can’t teach them that, I’m afraid.

Page 5 of 7
Page 5 of 7
 The pneumatic pistol is cool...

The pneumatic pistol is cool...

But it isn’t really necessary. Homefront has just a handful of weapons (actually ‘modifications’ of a couple base guns), and there’s nothing really exciting about any of them. The pneumatic pistol is the most interesting: it uses compressed air, which can be charged up, for silent kills. But I only used it once before switching back to the SMG as my secondary. If you want to take a stealthier approach to Homefront, it might be useful, but it’s unwieldy (it shakes the more you charge the air) and it’s not often you run into a lone soldier to take out. In those instances, you can just as easily use melee takedowns.

For your primary weapon, I recommend the marksman rifle. I like sniping, but it’s not just that: fully upgraded it makes quick work of bullet sponge heavies, and keeps you at a safe distance. There’s not much in the way of ballistics modeling (I haven’t noticed any bullet drop), which I find disappointing, but its power and accuracy has made it the gun I use most.

Page 6 of 7
Page 6 of 7
 Death doesn’t matter

Death doesn’t matter

I was a timid resistance soldier early on, because Homefront warned me so much about being spotted by guards. But dying, it turns out, doesn’t really matter. All you lose are some valuables you looted, which could’ve been turned in at stores for cash, but I never needed to worry about that. You get plenty of cash from missions. 

If you want to stay safe and go for a run with as few deaths as possible, I think that could be fun, but if you just want to get into firefights and actually use the guns you’re given, go nuts. You don’t lose any progress on your current tasks if you die, so if you have to, say, destroy six objectives, you can die after two and still only have four left.

I’m still debating myself over how good or bad the freedom to fail is. On one side, when death doesn’t matter, there’s little to motivate smart play outside of the player’s own will. On the other, if death is onerous but not very instructional—and you don’t learn a whole lot from dying in Homefront, other than to be more careful next time—it’d just be tiresome. I’ll have more to say about all that in my review later this week.

Page 7 of 7
Page 7 of 7
Tyler Wilde
Tyler Wilde
Social Links Navigation
Editor-in-Chief, US

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.

Read more
Grounded 2 tips: A character wearing a gas mask holding a club standing on a plastic fork overlooking Brookhollow Park.
7 Grounded 2 tips to survive Brookhollow Park
Grounded 2 Networking PSA: A character holding a club standing at the base of the Network Centre on the statue, with a purple Stranger symbol on the wall behind them.
Don't repeat my mistakes in Grounded 2's Networking mission, or you'll face an arduous slog back to collect your lost loot
Rematch football game
7 Rematch tips to help you hone your football skills
Character glancing to the side
Supermassive Games is adding a new tool to its next horror game Directive 8020 that'll give players a 'second chance' to save their favourite characters
Death Stranding 2 best upgrades - Sam
PSA: Grab the best upgrades from Death Stranding 2's first area before you leave
Hanna's face, half-lit by a sunset.
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review—Beautiful Scandinavian stealth that's too strict for its own good
Latest in FPS
Escape From Tarkov promo art - three EFT soldiers sitting side by side, looking off into the distance
Escape from Tarkov finally puts on the big boy pants and announces a Steam release as it gears up for version 1.0
battlefield 6 campaign trailer
'Min spec is certainly one of our most important': Battlefield 6 dev says low-end build players were a 'meaningful percentage' of the beta, and he aims to keep it that way
Call of Duty: Warzon Season 1 Reloaded - Two soldiers with assault rifles
A Call of Duty movie is in Paramount's crosshairs, but it might be a tough sell
 Image of a soldier in Battlefield 2042.
To help speed up unlocking those Battlefield 6 items, Battlefield 2042 is turning on the double XP hose every weekend until the new game launches
Borderlands 4 trailer still
Borderlands 4's new endgame mode will let you skip the campaign so you're ready for the next year of seasonal events and bosses
battlefield 6 reveal trailer
EA tells Battlefield Labs testers not to leak Battlefield 6's new big map, so of course they leaked it immediately
Latest in Features
Steal a Brainrot character in base with brainrots in the background
One of Roblox's biggest experiences right now is a bizarre Italian Brainrot character-stealing simulator and, lord help me, I now understand why it's so popular
Total War: Warhammer 3 unusual locations - Great Unclean One
Total War: Warhammer 3's new random locations can cause a game-ending plague, plant nukes under your settlements, or even buff you in all future campaigns thanks to the power of Tzeentchian time-warpery
The Neewer LED lighting kit on a rug, with the PC Gamer Budget Win or Recycle Bin logo in the top right
I didn't know I needed dedicated photography lights until this $48 set turned up, but now I'm a convert
A promotional image for the game Caput Mortum, showing a mysterious man wielding a dagger, and trapped by a giant snake
Five new Steam games you probably missed (September 1, 2025)
Hollow Knight Godmaster art
Hollow Knight's creators didn't want to be constrained by the 'metroidvania' label, but they accidentally set a standard that every game since—even Silksong—has to reckon with
The lighthouse covered in candy floss and floating into the air in Keeper.
Under Microsoft, Double Fine has made its weirdest game yet—and this is only the beginning: 'We can take more risks'
  1. Asus Zephyrus G14 and Razer Blade 16 gaming laptops
    1
    Best gaming laptop in 2025: I've tested a ton of notebooks this generation and these are the best in every category
  2. 2
    Best Hall effect keyboards in 2025: the fastest, most customizable keyboards for competitive gaming
  3. 3
    Best PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming in 2025: the only Gen 5 drives I will allow in my PC
  4. 4
    Best graphics cards in 2025: I've tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today's top cards
  5. 5
    Best gaming chair in 2025: I've tested a ton of gaming chairs and these are the seats I'd suggest for any PC gamer
  1. A Crucial X10 external SSD in blue with USB Type-C connector cable.
    1
    Crucial X10 review
  2. 2
    MSI Crosshair 16 HX AI (2025) review
  3. 3
    Shure SM4 Studio Kit microphone review
  4. 4
    Alienware 16 Area-51 review
  5. 5
    Herdling review

PC Gamer is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...